Connery’s £1.3bn trail of destruction as James Bond

FILMING of new Bond movie Spectre involved blowing up millions of pounds worth of high performance cars.

But now original 007 Sean Connery has been revealed as a more destructive James Bond than Daniel Craig.

Insurance company More Than has painstakingly calculated the cost every piece of damage caused in all 24 official Bond films – from £3 smashed ashtrays and £25 stolen shirts to a £1 billion submarine.

Roger Moore emerged as the most destructive Bond ever, with £4.6bn damage to vehicles, buildings, artefacts, possessions and the environment during his 12-year career as 007, including the destruction of an entire space station. That’s an average of £661,456,590 per film.

Pierce Brosnan came in second with damage estimated at £1.9bn or £476,441,346 per film.

Edinburgh-born Connery was third with £1.3bn worth of destruction, or £216,181,260 per film, pushing into fourth place with damage totalling £449,183,670 or £132,582,275 per film.

The figures are adjusted for inflation with the values given in today’s money

Altogether, James Bond in his different manifestations ran up a bill of £8bn of destruction spanning 50 years – almost as much as the entire GDP of Jamaica, where Ian Fleming famously lived and wrote the Bond books.

The most destruction – £4.3bn – was caused in Moonraker, made in 1979 with Moore in the starring role. It included the obliteration of five space shuttles and an entire space station.

Pierce Brosnan’s 1999 turn The World Is Not Enough had the next highest damages bill of £1.1bn thanks to the underwater destruction of a Russian nuclear submarine.

And despite being the least destructive overall the one-time Bond George Lazenby still managed to rack up £36 million of destruction On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969).

Current 007 Daniel Craig’s first three outings involved relatively low bills for damage, but his destruction levels have gone through the roof with new movie Spectre. Over 148 minutes Craig’s Bond manages to amass damages of approximately £449m.

The film’s trailer alone shows £7.5m of destruction – more than the total damages incurred in Thunderball, Octopussy and For Your Eyes Only combined.

More Than calculated that in the course of the 24 Bond films, a total of 210 vehicles have been damaged or destroyed, causing costs in the region of £33.9m, with an estimated £1.1bn worth of damage also inflicted on homes, landmarks and buildings.

Big-bill items among the catalogue of devastation include the complete destruction of a £3m Scottish mansion in Skyfall, £8m of havoc on the streets of St Petersburg in Goldeneye (1995), not to mention Blofeld’s £300m volcano lair in You Only Live Twice (1967). Taking everything into account, the average cost of destruction per James Bond film currently stands at a staggering £349,165,782.

More Than’s Tovah Grosscurth said: “We are shaken (but not stirred) to discover Roger has done more damage than Daniel as Bond. Nevertheless, whoever goes by the name Bond, James Bond, might want to consider taking out a very specialist insurance policy.”